The Luck of the Draw

When I think of turning points in my life, the first two that come to mind are when I decided not to go to college and when I joined the army. As it turned out they were both good decisions, but not on purpose. If I had gone to college, I most certainly would have taken ROTC because I liked military stuff in those days. Four years later, I would have graduated and either joined the army or been drafted. They would have made me a second lieutenant and likely sent me off to Vietnam, where I would likely have been killed, because the survival rate for second lieutenants in combat was the lowest of all the military ranks at the time. As it turned out, I joined the army less than a year after I graduated from high school. I asked to be sent to Vietnam, but the war hadn't escalated yet, so they sent me to Germany instead. I was discharged about a year after the Vietnam escalation and, by then, I no longer wanted to go to Vietnam anyway. Meanwhile, a lot of guys who joined the national guard to evade combat, experienced combat in the riot torn streets of America, while I spent a safe two and a half years drinking German beer and chasing German women. I wish I could say that I had planned the whole thing, but I didn't, it was just the luck of the draw. Of course this is all speculation, there are no guarantees in life, and no "do overs" either.

People have been keeping records on us all our lives, but there doesn't seem to be a central clearing house where all our records are kept in one place. Looking back on it, I don't know what gave me the idea that there was such a place. I just took it for granted, and I thought that everybody else did too. Maybe the reason it seemed that way was that there were no privacy laws to speak of in those days, and the police, the schools, the employers, and the military could easily access whatever records were being kept by any other agency. When computers came along, it made people nervous, and they started demanding privacy laws. Of course anything can be hacked, and always could be. When the records were kept in steel filing cabinets, a determined hacker could sneak into the office at night and hack the cabinet open with a crowbar. I don't think a lot of that went on in real life, not because they couldn't do it, but because most people didn't care what grades we got in high school or if we were ever busted for writing on the sidewalk, and they still don't.

I googled myself once, and I found this site that claimed to be able to tell me anything I wanted to know about myself, for a price. They said there were a half dozen people with my first name, last name, and middle initial living in the tri-county area, most of them in towns where I have never lived. A quick check of the phone book told me that my last name is not very common around here. There is one family in Petoskey, and one in Cheboygan, but that one spells it differently because it's the Polish version of my Czech family name. I am not related to any of these people, and I would be surprised if any of them had the same first name and middle initial that I do. What are the odds? Anyway, I didn't pay the price, so I didn't find out if any of the information this site had on me was true. If there is something about me that I don't already know, it's probably not important.